1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for simulating an indication provider, especially a WBEM/CIM indication provider for the purpose of testing a computer operating system's underlying support for such indication providers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that, according to its promulgator, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), “provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and services, and allows for vendor extensions”; its common definitions “enable vendors to exchange semantically rich management information between systems throughout the network”. CIM has been developed in conjunction with Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), characterized by the same promulgator as “a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of distributed computing environments”; WBEM “provides the ability for the industry to deliver a well-integrated set of standard-based management tools, facilitating the exchange of data across otherwise disparate technologies and platforms”. Current versions of CIM and WBEM are well known in the art and are described on Web pages published by DMTF. The basic relationship between the two standards is that CIM provides underlying support for WBEM.
WBEM and CIM have the notion of ‘indication providers’. An indication provider is a mechanism (implemented in software) that allows an end user or controlling program to monitor for the occurrence of ‘CIM event(s)’ of interest on a target computer system and to be notified when the event has occurred. In the WBEM architecture, the end user or controlling program is operating system independent (at a source code or application programming interface (API) level), while the indication provider is operating system dependent. In addition, the end user or controlling program may be executing on the target operating system or on a remote system.
FIG. 1 shows the interface between the overall WBEM/CIM architecture and an operating system's underlying WBEM/CIM indication provider support in a conventional computer system 100. More particularly, in the system 100 shown in FIG. 1, an end user or controlling program 102 interacts with a CIM server 104 through a client interface 106 of the CIM server. Also associated with the CIM server 104 are a data repository 108, security plugins 110 and an indication provider 112. CIM server 104 runs on a target operating system (OS) 114 having OS-specific indication provider support 116 with which the indication provider 114 interacts. Although the present invention is not limited to any particular operating system, one suitable operating system is the IBM z/OS operating system, running on an IBM System z server (not separately shown).
As depicted in FIG. 1, the CIM indication provider 112 on the target operating system 114 makes use of the underlying operating system-specific support 116 to detect the occurrence of an actual CIM event. Some currently available CIM testing tools do allow for functional validation of CIM indication providers 112 and the underlying operating system support 116. They typically do this by simulating an end user or controlling program 102, as shown in FIG. 1. Because of this approach they are lacking in their ability to easily drive high levels of stress on the underlying operating system-specific indication provider support 116. Such stress testing is desired in a software system-level test, as it uncovers a different class of problems than is exposed by functional-level testing that focuses on coverage of all code paths.